boost.fiber provides a framework for micro-/userland-threads (fibers) scheduled cooperativly. The API contains classes and functions to manage and synchronize fibers similiar to boost.thread. This library is intended to support quasi-concurrency on embedded system or to replace boost.thread for testing puposes (for instance checking for raise conditions) and to solve the many depended task problem.

A fiber is able to store the current execution state, including all registers and CPU flags, the instruction pointer, and the stack pointer and later restore this state. The idea is to have multiple execution paths running on a single thread using a sort of cooperative scheduling (threads are preemptively scheduled) - the running fiber decides explicitly when its yields to allow another fiber to run (context switching).

A context switch between threads costs usally thousends of CPU cycles on x86 compared to a fiber switch with less than 100 cycles. A fiber can only run on a single thread at any point in time but may be migrated between threads.

Buiding: Detailed instructions can be found at https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/TryModBoost.

git clone http://github.com/boostorg/boost modular-boost
cd modular-boost
git submodule update --init
cd libs

git clone http://github.com/olk/boost-fiber fiber
cd ..
cmake -P forward_headers.cmake
./bootstrap.sh

cp b2 /usr/local/bin
cd libs/fiber/test
b2